The nervous energy will creep in before Liverpool meet Manchester United at Anfield on Sunday. No fixture has a bigger cachet in English football and their meetings can throw up surprise results. “Form goes out of the window”, as the old saying goes.
Yet the truth is that United have never been less relevant to Liverpool than they are now. Not from a sporting perspective, anyway. And the further they drift down the Premier League table, the more absent they will become in the minds of Liverpool supporters, particularly those of younger generations.
The rivalry between two clubs from neighbouring cities in the north-west of England who love to hate each other will never disappear completely but their respective trajectories could not be much more divergent than at the start of 2025. While Liverpool are sitting pretty at the top of the 20-team Premier League table on 45 points, United are 14th with less than half as many (22), just seven ahead of promoted Ipswich Town and with their own head coach, Ruben Amorim, admitting they are in a relegation battle.
That points gap of 23 is not unprecedented — Liverpool were 24 ahead of United at the equivalent stage of their 2019-20 title-winning season — but never before have there been so many teams between the two clubs at the halfway stage of a Premier League campaign.
It would be unfair to compare the impact Arne Slot has had at Anfield since his summer appointment as Jurgen Klopp’s successor with the difficulties Amorim has faced since replacing the sacked Erik ten Hag at United two months ago, given the contrasting circumstances. Slot has done an extraordinary job, but he also had time to get his message across to the players during the pre-season and inherited a squad who led the Premier League deep into last season before fading in the final weeks to finish third.
Arne Slot has managed the transition from Jurgen Klopp seamlessly (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
Amorim, in contrast, has been trying to get to grips with one of the most challenging jobs in club football during one of the most hectic periods of the season, and with a squad whose confidence had already been drained by a wretched run of results under Ten Hag.
He has not helped himself at times, not least in his insistence on imposing the 3-4-3 formation he used at previous club Sporting CP of Lisbon on a set of players who seem ill-equipped to make it work (his devotion to that setup was one of the factors which counted against him when Liverpool considered appointing him when Klopp stepped down at the end of last season), but for now others are bearing the brunt of the criticism.
Former United defender turned TV pundit and commentator Gary Neville described their expensively-assembled line-up as the “pound-for-pound, worst team in the country” on Monday night during the 2-0 home defeat by Newcastle United, a result that was their sixth defeat in all competitions during December — the most United have suffered in a single calendar month since September 1930.
Few expect 2025 to start any better for United than the way 2024 ended as they head to Anfield for their first fixture of the year.
Slot’s side swatted them aside 3-0 at Old Trafford in September, in an early display of the Dutchman’s tactical nous, and if any pundit was asked to pick a composite XI from the two squads ahead of Sunday’s return fixture, it is hard to think of a single United player who would make the team. In football terms, there is now a chasm between these clubs.
That’s not to say it’s impossible for United to upset the odds at the weekend. They have made a habit of disrupting Liverpool’s progress in recent years: they were the only team to take points off them in the first six months of that 2019-20 season (a 1-1 draw in Manchester in the October) and, more pertinently, two trips to Old Trafford in quick succession derailed Liverpool’s quadruple bid under Klopp last spring.
First, United knocked their rivals out of the FA Cup in the quarter-finals with a 4-3 win after extra time; then, three weeks later, a 2-2 draw began a run of two wins in seven league games for Liverpool which snuffed out their title hopes.
Amad knocks Liverpool out of the FA Cup in the final minute of extra time last season (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
It’s results like those that have kept this fixture intriguing for so many years, because as bad as United have been at times, they’ve remained competitive, even at Anfield, where they have recorded two draws in their past four visits, albeit either side of crushing 7-0 and 4-0 defeats.
How long that continues remains to be seen. United have rarely been this bad — on paper, at least — and it’s no surprise that some younger Liverpool supporters now see this fixture in a similar light to the Merseyside derbies against Everton: an awkward skirmish with underdog opponents who still have just enough teeth to inflict a painful bite, though probably a non-lethal one.
It’s not that Liverpool have been dominant in isolated matches with United, but more that they’re the side of the two always chasing a bigger prize these days. For Liverpool, the biggest domestic occasions are now against Manchester City (although not this season, given even Pep Guardiola’s defending champions have fallen 14 points behind them already), Arsenal and Chelsea.
The enmity remains, and probably always will. Last year, when The Athletic asked supporters to vote on who they would rather win the league if Liverpool missed out, just 23 out of almost 3,000 responses said United (the majority went for Arsenal). The chance to silence United’s boasts of being the English club with the most top-flight titles (they have 20, one more than Liverpool) must also be a tantalising prospect.
But with half of this season remaining, the only relevance United have in terms of its title race is if they pull off an upset against one of the main contenders. For Liverpool, this is now a race against Arsenal, Chelsea and, remarkably, Nottingham Forest.
Sunday’s game will have colour and fervour. But sporting significance? Not really.
(Top photo: Michael Regan/Getty Images)